Alright
then, let's get something out in the open
here. The Slot A Thunderbird Athlon
from AMD is a chip that quite frankly
isn't supposed to be in the reseller
channel. However, the crafty folks
at Azzo
Computer, as well as a few other on
line retailers, have gotten a hold a these
chips and are making them available for
sale as long as supplies last. AMD
is really only manufacturing the Slot A
version of the chips for certain OEMs that
have Slot A motherboard designs still in
the production flow. The Socket A
version is intended for the R.O.W. (rest
of the world) demand and there are
currently several motherboards released
based on the VIA KT133 chipset which
support this socketed version. Now,
having said this, the only currently
shipping Slot A chipset that
"officially" supports the Slot A
T-Bird, is the AMD 750. The current
version of the Slot A chipset from VIA,
the KX133, only "officially"
supports the older version of the Athlon
with discrete cache on the PCB.

With
this in mind, you are probably thinking,
"why take one step forward to go one
step back"? For the users out
there who are currently running a
motherboard based on the AMD 750 chipset,
the Slot A Thunderbird will provide new
levels of performance with just a drop in
solution. For those users who are
looking at an entire new platform however,
you would be hard pressed to opt for the
AMD 750 based boards on the market when
the VIA chipset based solutions provide
the PC133 Memory and AGP 4X support that
the 750 doesn't have. So, where does
this leave the Slot A? Well, frankly
somewhere in between the old PC100 and the
new PC133 platform for the Athlon.

HOWEVER,
we decided to see what would happen when
we tried to setup the Slot A T-Bird on a
KX133 board. We were pleasantly
surprised to see that indeed it did run
and was stable. In our tests, we
used a new Gigabyte KX133 board, the
GA-7VX. It supports all of the usual
features of the KX133, including ATA66,
AGP4X, PC133 Memory and PC Health
Monitoring.

We'll
have a full review of this board shortly
but for now here is the obligatory
"candid photo"....

(click
for larger image)

Again,
more on this board when our boy "BigWop",
delves into it with a full review.
However, suffice it to say that Gigabyte
has some of the most stable motherboards
on the planet in our opinion. They
may not always have the widest assortment
of features but the quality is definitely
in there. Again this board was
stable with our 700MHz. Slot A T-bird at
stock speed and with a little bit of
over-clocking. We want to be very
specific here however, again this chipset
does not "officially" support
the T-Bird, at least for now. Your
experience with a KX133 board and a Slot A
T-Bird depends on many factors including
among other things, a robust and clean
power source. We used a Power Man
300 Watt unit and it did the job nicely.

In
addition, we have heard from one very
popular and large Motherboard Manufacturer
that they are working on a BIOS revision
for their current KX133 Slot A board,
which should bring full stability to the
mix. As soon as we get details on
this, we'll let you know. This could
be VERY good those of us looking to
"unlock" the T-Bird since the
easiest way is with a GFD (Gold Finger
Device) on a Slot A version CPU.

So,
with that lead in, let's take a look at
the over-clocking side of things shall we?

Overclocking
The Slot A Thunderbird

Just
like any other Athlon

We
have good news for those of you who are
not shy to crack open the case of an
Athlon, exposing the "Gold
Fingers" on top of the PCB. The
Outside
Loop Afterburner DOES work with the
new Slot A T-Birds. It works exactly
as the standard Athlon does and we were
able to change the multiplier with
it.

On
the top left of the PCB, you can see the
Gold Fingers. We also used a rather
large Global Win Heat Sink and Fan combo
with decent thermal paste joining the
two. On the right is the full setup
with the Afterburner installed. We used
the GA-7VX Motherboard's ability to change
the Front Side Bus speed and dialed in
stable at 115MHz. FSB. The
Afterburner allowed us to run at a
multiplier of 7.5, only a half step higher
than the stock multiplier. However,
this was the highest speed at which the
processor would run stable with our
standard mainstream cooling
solution. The voltage was dialed in
to 1.85V which seemed the best level for
stability.

Now,
in summary, I think we were fairly
successful here with our Slot A T-Bird, in
the over-clocking department. From
what we have seen of early Socket A T-Bird
reviews, with the current multiplier lock
(operative word is "current"
here), they are only able to over-clock to
about 10% over their stock speed since
front side bus speeds over 115MHz. tend to
bring out the "flakies" on the
Athlon's EV6 bus type. Our
processor's native clock speed of 700MHz.
was exceeded by almost 20% to a high of
863MHz.

For
now, the only "unlocked" T-Birds
will be the Slot A version. We have
heard of one motherboard manufacturer that
is claiming to have unlocked the Socket A
chips with specific pins that AMD
designates for the multiplier. We
are making an effort to get a hold of one
of these boards, when they are available
and will keep you posted.

So,
now that we have covered the basics
here. Let's dig in deeper on the
performance side of things!